All data is updated through 8 March 2024 - the source code can be found here.
The United States legislative branch of government is split into two houses: the upper house is the Senate and the lower house is the House of Representatives. The two houses of congress met for the first time in 1789, and throughout their 235 years of history, there have been 2,002 individuals who served in the Senate and 11,387 who served in the House. Today there are 100 senators, two for each state, and 438 representatives, with different numbers for each state based on population. All the data for this project is readily available on Wikipedia (Senators, Representatives), and the Python library BeautifulSoup was used to scrape the desired pages. After this, more python code was used for processing the data and preparing it for the following visualizations. The goal of this project is to look at how the composition of Congress has changed over the past 235 years by observing metrics including party, gender, age, and duration.